After a period of relative calm in the 1990s, since 2004 violence in the four southern provinces of Thailand has flared with the loss of over 3,000 lives, of whom about two thirds are Malay Muslims. A vast literature on the South seeks to analyse this violence in terms of the categories of separatism, ethnic insurrection, Islamic jihad or, even, a local form of globalised terrorism. This paper, on the contrary, seeks to look at the situation from “across the border”, so to speak, by describing it not as a problem within Thailand, but rather a problem for the Thai state of dealing with an ethnic population who do not perceive themselves as part of the Siamese entity whose pillars are the Monarchy, the Sangha and a Nation, all defined in Thai cultural terms. While Islam is one aspect of ethnic identification, it is above all the sense of living in an occupied land, separated by an artificial border from co-religionists and fellow Malays that may better describe a sense of loss that must be redeemed. This paper therefore seeks to reintegrate the notions of “irredentism” and “anticolonialism” as central to understanding the identity politics of this area of the Malay Peninsula. However the territory to be redeemed is not outside but within, hence the particularly introverted, and intractable, nature of the southern Thai conundrum.